by Mark Tufo
“Dad, do you want me to go with you?” Nicole asked as I headed out the back door. “I could cover you with…with a gun,” she added.
I looked down at her trembling hands. A palsy victim would have been appalled. “Um no, I think I might be safer if you stayed in the house.”
She looked both hurt and relieved.
“I love you sweetie,” I said as I pulled her close and kissed her forehead.
Justin came with me, standing right outside the closed back door, rifle not aimed yet but at the ready. Travis, Brendon and two guards from the bus gate who came to help finish off this mission, waited about ten feet to the side of the garage in the alleyway. I walked over to the garage entrance and took a couple of heavy breaths in preparation, listening one last time to see if I could make out the zombies’ respective locations in the garage. I glanced over to the kitchen window. Tracy and Nicole were looking out, watching. Tommy’s bulk in the background was unmistakable. The tension of this moment was lost on him, as I watched him playing with one of Travis’ old toys. I looked again, and crossed the yard, passing Justin. Before he could ask the question that was on his mind, I walked back in the house. Nicole and Tracy both stared at me in confusion. I walked over to Tommy. “Hey buddy, whatcha got there?” I asked.
“A spaceship!” he said with a sparkle in his eyes.
“Where’d you get that spaceship?” I asked.
He seemed to like this new game. “It was on the floor of Mrs. T’s car,” he answered.
It must have been flung off the visor with all the impacts the car had been through.
“Do you think I can borrow your ‘spaceship’ for a minute?” I asked.
“Yeah no problem, I figure it’s yours anyway, I found it in your car,” he answered.
“Thanks buddy.” I grabbed the garage remote and headed out the back gate to get rid of our unwanted guests.
The six of us were lined up in a row. We knew they weren’t going to come out sprinting, but we were all poised as if that was exactly what was going to happen. This didn’t ‘feel’ right. All the zombies we had killed so far had been a kill or be killed scenario and we hadn’t known any of them. This just seemed like cold-blooded murder. I don’t think a court in the land would convict me of killing a dead person though. This was much more personal, Jo(e), was, had been my neighbor. I had drank beers with her and talked sports and yeah, even women. (It had been a little strange to talk to a woman about what they found attractive in another woman.) I was staring down the gun sights of my M-16 about to kill someone that I considered more than an acquaintance. Goddamn it, I considered her a friend! That inconvenient truth wasn’t going to make it any easier.
“Now remember,” I said to everyone. “We wait until they come out of the garage before we start shooting.” (I didn’t want anyone putting a hole in my Jeep.)
Everyone nodded in agreement. Killing in the heat of battle was one thing, lying in wait and calculating death was a whole different story. The garage door rumbled up. We didn’t have long to wait, both of the zombies had been lurking by the door. Whether they had heard us, or more than likely smelled me, it didn’t matter. They walked out the door and into a hailstorm of fire and lead. The scene was a staccato burst of fire and shadow. The strobe light effect disoriented me. It made everything appear as if it was happening in slow motion. Jo(e)’s right arm was literally blown off. I watched in fascinated horror as the bits of bone and tendons flew in an arc, the wild flashing light highlighting their ascent and then rapid descent. And yet she still came forward. Merl, as I was to later learn his name, didn’t make it a foot out of the garage before Justin had put a 30-06 round through his belfry. Merl’s head swelled to twice its normal size trying to make accommodations for the bullet. When his noggin blew, it looked like someone had placed an M-80 in a watermelon. That was the simile I held onto, it allowed me to sleep at night.
And still Jo(e) kept coming. Travis seemed to have the stomach for this killing; his shotgun was slowly dissecting her, but the final blow hadn’t landed yet. I hadn’t even turned my safety off yet and still she came. I flinched every time the shotgun roared. Brendon walked up to Jo(e), a mere arm’s length away, and shot her dead-on (no pun intended). The .380 round thankfully wasn’t as blisteringly strong as Justin’s round so we were all spared the sight of Jo(e)’s brain bucket scattering across the alley. Her head lashed back violently and her neck snapped loud enough to rival the Mossberg. She crumbled to a heap no more than five feet away from me.
“I’m sorry Jo(e),” I said to her collapsed form.
The two men from the gate produced some body bags and made short work of disposing of the bodies, I didn’t stick around to compliment their efficiency. I walked into the garage solemnly, too distressed to even comment on the bird shot that peppered my passenger side quarter panel. This night just wouldn’t end. It was 10:30 p.m. and I still hadn’t had a shower.
CHAPTER 7 - December 9th 6:45am
Journal Entry - 7
I woke up with a start. I had to pry myself off the bed. It wasn’t just that I was still bone-weary, which I was. I was stuck to the comforter I had plopped down onto the previous night, where I had immediately fallen asleep. I didn’t even want to linger on what was keeping me so affixed to the quilt. I was trying to convince myself that I had fallen into a vat of cotton candy. That illusion, however tenuous, was broken when a bit of bone fell out of my hair. My eyes were adjusting to the vestiges of light that were seeping in from and around the drawn shades. Tracy was not here. I sat up with a start. ‘What was going on?’ Then it hit me! The putrid stink of death! They had made it past Jed’s barriers and were now in the house! My gun was right next to me. I jumped up and out of the bed, anxious to see who, if anybody, could be saved. Fear gripped my chest in a vise. I could let air escape but I didn’t have the capacity to let any in. I was on the verge of panicking. All that I held sacred in this world was in trouble, and my worthless ass had been sleeping. I could hear no sounds of disarray, but that did little to stem the rising tide of trepidation that threatened to dash me against the rocks of sanity. The living dead don’t make much noise. I heard crunching! Bile involuntarily rose in my throat. I would choke on vomit long before I was able to help anyone. I flew down the stairs, turning the corner of the landing in one deft move. Henry greeted my heaving body, bone in his grinning mouth, short stubby tail wagging a mile a minute.
“Well, hey there, sleepyhead,” my beautiful, beautiful wife said from the kitchen as she sipped on a cup of coffee. Dark rings circled her eyes, but I don’t think I had ever beheld such a sight. I laid the rifle down, approaching my wife for a hug and kiss of reassurance.
“Oh hell no!” she said as her eyes lit up in alarm.
I stopped dead in my tracks, what was amiss?
“There’s no way you’re hugging me, smelling like that,” she laughed. “Your stench is what made me wake up this early. Go take a shower, and if you can at least get to the point where you smell better than Henry, I’ll think about kissing you.”
Henry looked up to my wife with a hurt expression as if to say, ‘Don’t compare me to that guy, he stinks.’ And then went back to the delightful chore of chewing on his steak bone. Relief poured, no GUSHED through my system, a wave of euphoria momentarily made me lightheaded. Thankfully I was already halfway back up the stairs. What the hell was going on with me? I was having feelings, I had sobbed and now I was swooning, a couple more days of this crap and I was going to need some Tampax.
I took a brief but intensely hot shower, hoping that I would be rewarded with a renewed and cleansed soul to go with my clean body. When I emerged from the steam and swept my hand over the mirror to wipe away the condensation, I noted that I looked a whole lot better than I felt. Last night’s ordeal had aged me beyond my years. I looked to all concerned to be 43. I, however, felt to be about 63. No more time for reflection. I walked out of the steamy bathroom into the relative coolness of our bedroom. The reddish glow to my
skin lit the way. I dressed quickly, delighting in the feel of my t-shirt NOT sticking to my neck, back or arms. I wanted to revel in the cleanliness a little longer but I was already running late for the town hall meeting. I grabbed my jacket from the hook at the bottom of the stairs and was about to head out.
Tracy yelled from the kitchen. “Do you want some breakfast before you go?”
“No time,” I shouted as I turned back to get my rifle; it wouldn’t do to go anywhere without it any more. The old American Express ads moved into my hemisphere of thought. "Don't Leave Home Without It.” ‘Thanks, Karl Malden,' I murmured to myself.
“I made scones,” Tracy teased.
I stopped short, lucky to not twist an ankle with the forces I used to turn around. “What kind?” I asked, hoping beyond hope. (Not the cranberry almond, not the cranberry almond, not the cranberry almond…) My fingers crossed like a third grader’s.
“Blueberry.”
“With glaze?” I asked, my voice tremulous.
She nodded.
“Yes!” I pumped my fist in the air. “I might be able to spare a minute or two,” I said as I closed the front door.
“I thought so,” she answered as she poured a glass of milk.
The meeting was being held in the complex’s clubhouse. It was a sturdy looking structure, an ‘A’ frame that would probably look much more at home at some alpine setting than here in Aurora, Colorado. I showed up to the meeting twenty minutes late.
“Nice of you to show, Talbot,” Jed said from the dais at the front of the committee room. Everyone present turned to see.
“Um, I got a little detained,” I answered sheepishly.
“What is that on your mustache?” Jed said, straining to get a better look. “Is that blueberry?” he asked incredulously.
I licked it away furiously before he could confirm his suspicions.
“Where is everybody?” I asked trying to change the subject, only realizing too late that I had just made matters worse.
The room was usually standing room only, and that was if we were only going to discuss the mailbox placement. This seemed infinitely more important, and there were dozens of available chairs.
Jed let the blueberries go. His shoulders slumped. “This is all that’s left,” he answered.
I sat down with a thump into one of the many vacancies. “Oh dear God,” I muttered.
Jed was a crotchety old fart but his community had been turned asunder and he was having a difficult time coming to grips with it. This was the fastidious man who scolded children for sledding on the snow-covered hills, fearing that they might tear up the grass underneath. And now his assembly was reduced in one night to a third of the mass it had been. It had been a shock to him, but the tough old badger was going to make sure the rest of us made it through the turmoil. I was impressed, considering he was prior army. I wouldn’t have thought he had the intestinal fortitude for this. But he had already gone far above any of my expectations. While everyone had been running around like chickens without heads, he had the Northern gates shut, guarded and appropriated an RV from the Millers, who were here and still glowering. He had also somehow got hold of a bus to close off the last gate, all the while assembling a team to go house to house (not garage to garage) to dispatch the enemy. I was amazed, and that offer of a kiss was still valid if he ever decided he wanted it. I had done everything humanly possible to save my family; Jed had thought on a much broader scale.
The first part of the meeting had been a sounding of the bell ceremony for the Little Turtle fallen. I was thankful I had missed that. I had no wish to hear the names of the dead. They were just about to get to the meat of the meeting (sarcasm intended) when I showed up.
Jed continued. “I know it’s going to be difficult to guard so much area.” There was no reason for him to verbalize the reason; there were so few of us now. “We have to keep two people at each of the fenced gates at all times, and I’ll take ideas on how to shore those up. They were never designed to stop a determined pedestrian. No need to worry about the southwest gate. The RV isn’t going anywhere.”
Old man Miller got up to protest. “You didn’t say anything about turning it over on its side when you ‘borrowed’ it Jed,” Gerald Miller sneered. “That was mine and the missus’ vacation home!” he yelled as loud as his oxygen tank fueled lungs would allow.
Jed looked like he was about to blow a gasket. That was the same look that got me going and thrown out of the town meeting a few months earlier.
“Gerry, where exactly are you and the missus planning on going to vacation NOW?” Jed stated, placing the emphasis on ‘now.’
“Well, we could have used it to escape to Florida,” Gerry said dejectedly.
“Oh yeah,” Jed stated sarcastically. “They didn’t hand out ANY flu shots in the retirement capital of the world.”
I had missed the news broadcasts that were still operational. They had decisive evidence that the flu vaccination was the culprit and not voodoo mysticism, as many of the more superstitious types (me) had reckoned. At this point though, what’s the difference. A zombie’s a zombie, I don’t care how it got to the point of wanting to eat my brains, I just wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. Gerry didn’t make any more interjections. He pouted as best he could with an oxygen tube coming out of his nose.
“Okay, now that that matter is closed,” Jed said, as he looked straight at Gerry. “I’d like at least four people at the bus gate. I’m worried about the clearance. The zombies that showed up last night showed no inkling that they even noticed there was a way in under the bus. I’d say let’s flip the bus too.”
Gerry loudly harrumphed.
“But I want it mobile in case we need to get it out of the way quickly, plus we’re going to have cars coming and going all the time,” Jed added, with a stern glance in Gerry’s direction.
One of the residents, an older lady with white hair that I always saw walking her Corgi asked, “why don’t we just seal it up and be done with it?”
I thought she answered haughtily for one that lived so close to the fringes of lower class society. Maybe her rich husband took off with a young floozy and only left her with that ankle biting little pecker Welsh Corgi.
“…Need to…” Jed had brought me back from my little inward detour. “Get supplies and food. And we might need it if we have to leave in a large group in a hurry,” he continued. “Now I know nobody is going to like this part. I want to assemble teams of five to scour all the unoccupied townhomes. This is going to be a lot of work but we need to figure out where we are at. So grab all the food, gas, weapons, ammo, batteries, whatever you think we can use. Bring it here to the other smaller conference room and we’ll go from there. Also look for a couple of larger stepladders. I want to use those as guard towers.”
I stood up to ask a question. Jed didn’t look happy about it.
“The floor recognizes Michael Talbot,” Jed said, wiping his hand over his brow.
“Jed, fellow survivors,” I started. Some winced at that, maybe because they hadn’t thought of it that way or maybe they just didn’t want to. “I’ve got a couple of questions.”
“We figured that Talbot, or you wouldn’t have gotten up,” Jed sarcastically stated. I was going to take back my offer to kiss him if he kept this up.
“What’s our stance on interlopers?” Jed had thought of everything but this issue. “I mean,” I continued. “What are we going to do with…” I thought for a second, the word still didn’t sound right when it came out of my mouth. “… refugees?” (This wasn’t Grenada.)
Jed thought for a second. He didn’t want to come to a snap decision. “I guess that’s unavoidable,” Jed stated to no one in particular. “On one hand it will ease up the load of responsibilities and burdens we will have to bear.”
Miss White Hair with the canine ankle biter spoke out. “Responsibilities? Burdens? Guard duty? I want no part of that,” she said frostily.
‘Wrong answer,’ I tho
ught.
Without missing a beat, Jed said, “Mrs. Deneaux, when will you be leaving then?”
Her face lost more color than her hair. Even her dog looked like he had been pistol-whipped. She didn’t respond in any fashion. I took that to be she was agreeing to Jed’s will.
“Back to the refugees,” Jed said. I could tell that even he was having difficulty with that word. “Eventually it will become more and more problematic to house and feed them. We’d be all right for the first hundred or two until it began to tax our resources. But if we start taking people in we can’t get to a point and then start turning them away. I mean we could, but I don’t want to be that person that turns a family away because we’re out of space. If we open the doors for one, we open it for all. We may get to the point where we will run out of empty homes and will have to open our own houses too.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Mrs. Deneaux interjected. “I will not open my doors to any strangers, especially if they’re not the right color.”
Mr. Hernandez stood up, angry as all get out. Even Tommy would have been able to tell where this was going.
“Sit down, Don,” Jed said sympathetically to Mr. Hernandez. “Is it really worth arguing with her?”
Mrs. Deneaux glowered. This wasn’t one of those touchy feely moments like in the movies, where Mrs. Deneaux reluctantly saw the errors of her ways and eventually accepted a black family into her home as they overcome all obstacles set in their way. She lived as a racist bigot bitch and she would probably die as a racist bigot bitch. C'est la vie. Mrs. Deneaux was happy Don hadn’t said anything. She liked it a lot better when they stayed quiet and mowed the lawns.